Re: The greeting code in Java

On 06/19/2011 10:17 AM, Saeed Amrollahi wrote:


If that is what you're explaining in Java, you also need to explain for
C++ stack constructed-objects, references, #include (trust me, beginners
can get very confused about #include, as simple as it looks), and
probably the entire iostream interfaces if you're talking about Java's
stream class hierarchy.


If it's simpler, it's only superficially so. C++'s interfaces heavily
optimize for the most common case and render the development of the more
critical components inordinately more difficult. For example, a fair
amount of my work has to worry about the use of international characters
and multiple charsets (it's not unimaginable that I have to use one
stream to write in two simultaneous charsets (i.e., the control protocol
is in UTF-8 but I send 8-bit MIME payloads of ISO 8859-1)). In Java, I
can keep both the raw Stream and a controlling Reader/Writer around and
use the character-based one for control information and the octet-based
one for data payloads.

And, naturally, any talk of C++ being simpler becomes hard to stomach
once you introduce templates, i.e., any use of the STL. std::string
isn't actually a class, it's actually std::basic_string<char,
std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, as every error message
involving std::set<std::string> will helpfully inform you. I mean
std::set<std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>,
std::allocator<char> >, std::less<std::basic_string<char,
std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >,
std::allocator<std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>,
std::allocator<char> > > >. Have fun debugging your template errors!

--
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth